"Can I feed the world? That's a wonderful question, one of my favourites," Salatin smiles, having more or less asked the question himself. "Not only can we feed the world, this is the only system that really can feed the world."
And, I ask, what happens to the next 9,000 people, and the next and the next?
Shocking to think there might be a few flaws in his system (not) .... or maybe it really is only a transitional system until there is a greater reconnect between people and our food, until our taste changes back to what is was before Big Corp's advertising (brainwashing) made us crave whatever it profited them to make. Case in point, the chicken. Why do people now favor white meat when dark meat is more flavorful and nutritious? (And why on earth do even people who love raising their own backyard chickens still insist that the old layers are too tough to eat??? Gods! Cooked right, the old gals are the most flavorful birds you'll find.)
In Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals, a poultry farmer named Frank Reese, who raises heritage breeds only, not birds whose genes are identical to the industrial birds, criticises Salatin in these terms. "That farm is a joke," Reese says of Polyface. "Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds. Call him up and ask him. So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference. It's like putting a broken-down Honda on the autobahn and saying it's a Porsche."
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